Manatsu

1st August. The last 71.3Km round-trip to Amakashi no Oka. Burnt my skin. Lol. This is also my personal record so far. Actually I never had such urge to ride in this heat but since this might be the last time that I can ever do that, so what choice did I have?

2nd August. Mitarai Valley trip with the new friend I made last month. 

Thesis defense by the end of this month. Moving out preparation. 

Emailed some companies, either no reply or plainly rejected. Pure bad luck? The reason is always simply 'not enough experience' where they don't even mention about it in their requirement. Just say that you are afraid to take risk in this current situation. I can understand that. It is happening globally anyway.

11 August. Went out with my new-made friend who was run out of rice. Sat in front of the 'einstein' building. Talked a little while and suddenly I saw the first shooting-star in my life. It was around 22:30 and soon after I knew that from 11-12 August there was a meteor shower! I felt so lucky. It looked like a bright object but gone in a flash.  

14 August. Went to Osaka to meet mid-school friend is currently a research student in Muroran, Hokkaido. He came to Kansai area during Obon holiday and the flight ticket was damn cheap (12k yen round-trip). Ate duck ramen Moeyo Mensuke near Fukushima station. Went to a dept store where he bought a shirt. Then we went together with 2 girls from my campus who were coincidentally went to Osaka around the same time. One of them is a postdoc researcher at Bio dept. The trip continued to shinsaibashi where we planned to eat at Cafe Bintang but unfortunately, it was closed. So we went to Saizeriya and got back together.

15 August. The long-awaited laptop finally delivered; Welcome home my custom Lenovo T14 Gen 1. This is my first ever AMD device. But the sad news is kissanime and kissmanga were finally taken down due to the copyright shit. Fuck you.

19 August. Another progress report group meeting. My co-supervisor asked me about the result of the previous additional result. I didn't put it in my presentation. Got a bad feeling. Went to the lab immediately since the data was in the laptop which turned itself off at critical moments. Sent the result that afternoon and also discussed with my supervisor. He told me to do another run with other feature. I hate to say this but I feel that it is not solving the whole problem. Asked my co-supervisor, she couldn't give any orders since the time is so limited. Understandable. Last resort, the big boss. He told me to do the full comparison with baseline method but the same input features used for the proposed method since the problem is there.

22-23 August. Worked my ass off to get the new additional result ASAP since it will affect my thesis conclusion. Got the result and reported to the big boss Monday afternoon. He told me to just put those into appendix of my presentation and update the thesis.

26 August. Got an email from the international office that the ticket might be delayed, thus I have to stay in Japan as a research student (again). That is if my lab or any other wants to take me in, otherwise? My other concern is that even though the offer is good (plus the campus would let me stay in the dorm) my willpower to do research has already been depleted. On the other note, the Professor might find it hard to keep a refugee for uncertain period of time since neither the international office nor the scholarship sponsor knows when they could obtain the flight. So why it is hard to the Professor you might ask. The reason lies within the workload of the project that they have to assign on me. 

28 August. Got the news from the international office that the big boss said that he agreed to let me refuge as a research student due to the current situation. Met him on that day to proceed with the application, and in the afternoon I heard that he was questioning my preparation for the thesis. I didn't realize what's lacking. But on Saturday, I sent my presentation slides to the committee as a form of feedback. Seriously, do I lack some sort of common sense? Lately I've been wondering.

29 August. I woke up in the morning with a terrible nightmare. So my brain replayed the scene when the big boss was signing the application for my special research student application. That time, the secretary asked for a clarification from him about how long should I work per week and her instinct was to follow the past application (back in 2018 when I was first came to Japan). The scene was truly as it was except the ending when the boss said "Sure, no problem." It was supposed to stop at that point, however I heard something like "As if he did his job." following the first sentence.

Later that afternoon, I took a nap wondering about what will happen during the defense because honestly I am still traumatized by what happened to me during the Go/No-Go presentation last time. I don't want that to happen and the truth is that thing is rarely happens in the lab. Most of the time the students will just graduate as it is. But that didn't happen in my case. I guess I'm really exceptional (in a bad term). In my dream I got a confirmation email from the thesis committee that my presentation already fine, but then I realized that it is too good to be true so I checked the email one more time to make sure, and yes. It was all a dream. 

So I spent the weekend terrified and drowned in anxiety. As I realized that it only takes 30 minutes to shatter everything I've done in the last 2.5 years. 

31 August. The thesis defense day. Went to the lab in the morning to have some rehearsal with my Thai friend. Spoke too fast, the second one I rehearsed it with my supervisor and one M2 student. Still too fast, but slightly better. There was a 10-minutes QnA session too. One thing that came to my mind that time is keep an open mind and respect the asker. Which is the complete opposite of the word 'defense'. the night before I spent some time to read how to handle the thesis defense. That night I realized that no one wants me to fail; They wanted me to succeed instead. So the term defense is not an appropriate word here to be honest. This might be the turn-point.

Lastly, on that day I asked another thesis committee to do quick-check my slide for a moment and added one slide to describe how I trained the model. That's it. Another 1.5 hour for self-rehearsal and it's my time. Luckily, it was as what that post said. Most of the questions are rather asking for clarification rather than the justification of the method or asking why I didn't do something.